I'm researching dinosaurs for a spring line and found this monstrosity:
The Helicoprion
One description:
A coil of teeth caps the lower jaw of a sculpture of a 13-foot (4-meter) whorl-tooth shark, or Helicoprion, a fish genus that lived about 250 million years ago.
Artist Gary Staab depicts the animal's jaw as something of a spiral conveyor belt, in which new teeth would advance to replace old ones (concealed here by skin) . But the true arrangement and purpose of the teeth remains a mystery. Some scientists suggest that it may have operated like a spiked whip, possibly curled underneath the lower jaw like a weaponized elephant trunk.
Another:
Helicoprion lived about 250 million years ago. It belongs to a group of early sharks whose jaws evolved an elaborate buzz saw-like tooth whorl composed of successively larger replacement teeth, each one fixed to the tooth in front, forming an ever-growing spiral with the earliest (smallest) teeth at its center. This structure may have been used to injure or disable prey, which the shark could then eat at leisure. Helicoprion may have reached lengths over 10 feet, but many of its relatives were smaller and had less impressive tooth spirals.
Helicoprion. The shark itself is poorly known, but the pattern of its teeth is instantly recognisable. They formed a whorl erupting from the back of a semi-circular 'conveyor belt arrangement', but the teeth did not fall away at the front as in modern sharks. Instead, they were rotated under the apex of the lower jaw, and then back up into a cavity under the jaw where they were stored in a tight spiral. Why these sharks possessed such a bizarre dental arrangement is another mystery.
